# Research Papers — 2026-04 · bundle page 110 of 233

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### Rethinking Patient Education as Multi-turn Multi-modal Interaction

Authors: Zonghai Yao, Zhipeng Tang, Chengtao Lin, Xiong Luo, Benlu Wang, Juncheng Huang, Chin Siang Ong, Hong Yu
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14656v1

Most medical multimodal benchmarks focus on static tasks such as image question answering, report generation, and plain-language rewriting. Patient education is more demanding: systems must identify relevant evidence across images, show patients where to look, explain findings in accessible language, and handle confusion or distress. Yet most patient education work remains text-only, even though combined image-and-text explanations may better support understanding. We introduce MedImageEdu, a benchmark for multi-turn, evidence-grounded radiology patient education. Each case provides a radiology report with report text and case images. A DoctorAgent interacts with a PatientAgent, conditioned on a hidden profile that captures factors such as education level, health literacy, and personality. When a patient question would benefit from visual support, the DoctorAgent can issue drawing instructions grounded in the report, case images, and the current question to a benchmark-provided drawing tool. The tool returns image(s), after which the DoctorAgent produces a final multimodal response consisting of the image(s) and a grounded plain-language explanation. MedImageEdu contains 150 cases from three sources and evaluates both the consultation process and the final multimodal response along five dimensions: Consultation, Safety and Scope, Language Quality, Drawing Quality, and Image-Text Response Quality. Across representative open- and closed-source vision-language model agents, we find three consistent gaps: fluent language often outpaces faithful visual grounding, safety is the weakest dimension across disease categories, and emotionally tense interactions are harder than low education or low health literacy. MedImageEdu provides a controlled testbed for assessing whether multimodal agents can teach from evidence rather than merely answer from text.

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### AgentGA: Evolving Code Solutions in Agent-Seed Space

Authors: David Y. Y. Tan, Kellie Chin, Jingxian Zhang
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14655v2

We present AgentGA, a framework that evolves autonomous code-generation runs by optimizing the agent seed: the task prompt plus optional parent archives that initialize a fresh workspace. The outer loop searches over these reusable starting conditions rather than editing code directly. Each generation launches a fresh autonomous run in an isolated workspace, while selected parent archives provide inherited artifacts that descendants can inspect and reuse. AgentGA couples a population-level genetic algorithm with long-horizon agents; selection uses deterministic 1:1 elite tournaments and operator allocation is adapted online with a modified Hedge controller. We instantiate the approach for tabular AutoML on the 16-competition Weco-Kaggle Lite benchmark. Across the full benchmark, AgentGA averages 71.90% Exceeds % of Human versus 51.38% for the AIDE reference, winning 15/16 competitions. Within AgentGA runs, descendants conditioned on inherited parent archives win 51.9% of 1,680 parent-child tournaments versus 8.6% for de novo proposals. These results support agent-seed optimization as a practical design choice for autonomous code-search systems.

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### CURA: Clinical Uncertainty Risk Alignment for Language Model-Based Risk Prediction

Authors: Sizhe Wang, Ziqi Xu, Claire Najjuuko, Charles Alba, Chenyang Lu
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14651v2

Clinical language models (LMs) are increasingly applied to support clinical risk prediction from free-text notes, yet their uncertainty estimates often remain poorly calibrated and clinically unreliable. In this work, we propose Clinical Uncertainty Risk Alignment (CURA), a framework that aligns clinical LM-based risk estimates and uncertainty with both individual error likelihoods and cohort-level ambiguities. CURA first fine-tunes domain-specific clinical LMs to obtain task-adapted patient embeddings, and then performs uncertainty fine-tuning of a multi-head classifier using a bi-level uncertainty objective. Specifically, an individual-level calibration term aligns predictive uncertainty with each patient's likelihood of error, while a cohort-aware regularizer pulls risk estimates toward event rates in their local neighborhoods in the embedding space and places extra weight on ambiguous cohorts near the decision boundary. We further show that this cohort-aware term can be interpreted as a cross-entropy loss with neighborhood-informed soft labels, providing a label-smoothing view of our method. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-IV clinical risk prediction tasks across various clinical LMs show that CURA consistently improves calibration metrics without substantially compromising discrimination. Further analysis illustrates that CURA reduces overconfident false reassurance and yields more trustworthy uncertainty estimates for downstream clinical decision support.

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### Seen-to-Scene: Keep the Seen, Generate the Unseen for Video Outpainting

Authors: Inseok Jeon, Minhyeok Lee, Seunghoon Lee, Minseok Kang, Suhwan Cho, Sangyoun Lee
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14648v1

Video outpainting aims to expand the visible content of a video beyond the original frame boundaries while preserving spatial fidelity and temporal coherence across frames. Existing methods primarily rely on large-scale generative models, such as diffusion models. However, generationbased approaches suffer from implicit temporal modeling and limited spatial context. These limitations lead to intraframe and inter-frame inconsistencies, which become particularly pronounced in dynamic scenes and large outpainting scenarios. To overcome these challenges, we propose Seen-to-Scene, a novel framework that unifies propagationbased and generation-based paradigms for video outpainting. Specifically, Seen-to-Scene leverages flow-based propagation with a flow completion network pre-trained for video inpainting, which is fine-tuned in an end-to-end manner to bridge the domain gap and reconstruct coherent motion fields. To further improve the efficiency and reliability of propagation, we introduce a reference-guided latent propagation that effectively propagates source content across frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior temporal coherence and visual realism with efficient inference, surpassing even prior state-of-the-art methods that require input-specific adaptation.

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### Targeted Exploration via Unified Entropy Control for Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Chen Wang, Lai Wei, Yanzhi Zhang, Chenyang Shao, Zedong Dan, Weiran Huang, Ge Lan, Yue Wang
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14646v2

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). However, the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) consistently suffers from entropy collapse, causing the policy to converge prematurely and lose diversity. Existing exploration methods introduce additional bias or variance during exploration, making it difficult to maintain optimization stability. We propose Unified Entropy Control for Reinforcement Learning (UEC-RL), a framework that provides targeted mechanisms for exploration and stabilization. UEC-RL activates more exploration on difficult prompts to search for potential and valuable reasoning trajectories. In parallel, a stabilizer prevents entropy from growing uncontrollably, thereby keeping training stable as the model consolidates reliable behaviors. Together, these components expand the search space when needed while maintaining robust optimization throughout training. Experiments on both LLM and VLM reasoning tasks show consistent gains over RL baselines on both Pass@1 and Pass@$k$. On Geometry3K, UEC-RL achieves a 37.9\% relative improvement over GRPO, indicating that it sustains effective exploration without compromising convergence and underscoring UEC-RL as a key for scaling RL-based reasoning in large models. Our code is available at https://github.com/597358816/UEC-RL.

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### Chaotic CNN for Limited Data Image Classification

Authors: Anusree M, Akhila Henry, Pramod P Nair
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, nlin.CD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14645v1

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) often exhibit poor generalisation in limited training data scenarios due to overfitting and insufficient feature diversity. In this work, a simple and effective chaos-based feature transformation is proposed to enhance CNN performance without increasing model complexity. The method applies nonlinear transformations using logistic, skew tent, and sine maps to normalised feature vectors before the classification layer, thereby reshaping the feature space and improving class separability. The approach is evaluated on greyscale datasets (MNIST and Fashion-MNIST) and an RGB dataset (CIFAR-10) using CNN architectures of varying depth under limited data conditions. The results show consistent improvement over the standalone (SA) CNN across all datasets. Notably, a maximum performance gain of 5.43% is achieved on MNIST using the skew tent map with a 3-layer CNN at 40 samples per class. A higher gain of 9.11% is observed on Fashion-MNIST using the sine map with a 3-layer CNN at 50 samples per class. Additionally, a strong gain of 7.47% is obtained on CIFAR-10 using the skew tent map at 200 samples per class. The consistent improvements across different chaotic maps indicate that the performance gain is driven by the shared nonlinear and dynamical properties of chaotic systems. The proposed method is computationally efficient, requires no additional trainable parameters, and can be easily integrated into existing CNN architectures, making it a practical solution for data-scarce image classification tasks.

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### CURaTE: Continual Unlearning in Real Time with Ensured Preservation of LLM Knowledge

Authors: Seyun Bae, Seokhan Lee, Eunho Yang
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14644v1

The inability to filter out in advance all potentially problematic data from the pre-training of large language models has given rise to the need for methods for unlearning specific pieces of knowledge after training. Existing techniques overlook the need for continuous and immediate action, causing them to suffer from degraded utility as updates accumulate and protracted exposure of sensitive information. To address these issues, we propose Continual Unlearning in Real Time with Ensured Preservation of LLM Knowledge (CURaTE). Our method begins by training a sentence embedding model on a dataset designed to enable the formation of sharp decision boundaries for determining whether a given input prompt corresponds to any stored forget requests. The similarity of a given input to the forget requests is then used to determine whether to answer or return a refusal response. We show that even with such a simple approach, not only does CURaTE achieve more effective forgetting than existing methods, but by avoiding modification of the language model parameters, it also maintains near perfect knowledge preservation over any number of updates and is the only method capable of continual unlearning in real-time.

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### Physically-Induced Atmospheric Adversarial Perturbations: Enhancing Transferability and Robustness in Remote Sensing Image Classification

Authors: Weiwei Zhuang, Wangze Xie, Qi Zhang, Xia Du, Zihan Lin, Zheng Lin, Hanlin Cai, Jizhe Zhou, Zihan Fang, Chi-man Pun, Wei Ni, Jun Luo
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14643v1

Adversarial attacks pose a severe threat to the reliability of deep learning models in remote sensing (RS) image classification. Most existing methods rely on direct pixel-wise perturbations, failing to exploit the inherent atmospheric characteristics of RS imagery or survive real-world image degradations. In this paper, we propose FogFool, a physically plausible adversarial framework that generates fog-based perturbations by iteratively optimizing atmospheric patterns based on Perlin noise. By modeling fog formations with natural, irregular structures, FogFool generates adversarial examples that are not only visually consistent with authentic RS scenes but also deceptive. By leveraging the spatial coherence and mid-to-low-frequency nature of atmospheric phenomena, FogFool embeds adversarial information into structural features shared across diverse architectures. Extensive experiments on two benchmark RS datasets demonstrate that FogFool achieves superior performance: not only does it exceed in white-box settings, but also exhibits exceptional black-box transferability (reaching 83.74% TASR) and robustness against common preprocessing-based defenses such as JPEG compression and filtering. Detailed analyses, including confusion matrices and Class Activation Map (CAM) visualizations, reveal that our atmospheric-driven perturbations induce a universal shift in model attention. These results indicate that FogFool represents a practical, stealthy, and highly persistent threat to RS classification systems, providing a robust benchmark for evaluating model reliability in complex environments.

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### Learning to Draw ASCII Improves Spatial Reasoning in Language Models

Authors: Shiyuan Huang, Li Liu, Jincheng He, Leilani H. Gilpin
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14641v1

When faced with complex spatial problems, humans naturally sketch layouts to organize their thinking, and the act of drawing further sharpens their understanding. In this work, we ask whether a similar principle holds for Large Language Models (LLMs): can learning to construct explicit visual layouts from spatial descriptions instill genuine spatial understanding? We introduce Text2Space, a dataset that pairs natural language descriptions with ground-truth ASCII grid layouts and spatial QA pairs, enabling us to separate failures in constructing spatial representations from failures in reasoning over them. We adopt ASCII because it is human-readable, operates entirely within the token space of language models, and encodes spatial relations in a structurally verifiable form. Our evaluation reveals a pronounced "Read-Write Asymmetry": LLMs interpret ASCII representations effectively but struggle to produce them from text, and these construction errors propagate to incorrect answers downstream. To address this limitation, we train models on layout construction (Text$\rightarrow$ASCII) and find that it significantly improves spatial reasoning from text alone, even without producing any ASCII at inference time. Combining construction with comprehension training further amplifies these gains. Crucially, these improvements transfer to three external spatial reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating that, much as sketching sharpens human spatial thinking, learning to construct explicit layouts instills spatial understanding that generalizes beyond the training format.

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### Fact4ac at the Financial Misinformation Detection Challenge Task: Reference-Free Financial Misinformation Detection via Fine-Tuning and Few-Shot Prompting of Large Language Models

Authors: Cuong Hoang, Le-Minh Nguyen
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14640v1

The proliferation of financial misinformation poses a severe threat to market stability and investor trust, misleading market behavior and creating critical information asymmetry. Detecting such misleading narratives is inherently challenging, particularly in real-world scenarios where external evidence or supplementary references for cross-verification are strictly unavailable. This paper presents our winning methodology for the "Reference-Free Financial Misinformation Detection" shared task. Built upon the recently proposed RFC-BENCH framework (Jiang et al. 2026), this task challenges models to determine the veracity of financial claims by relying solely on internal semantic understanding and contextual consistency, rather than external fact-checking. To address this formidable evaluation setup, we propose a comprehensive framework that capitalizes on the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach systematically integrates in-context learning, specifically zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies, with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to optimally align the models with the subtle linguistic cues of financial manipulation. Our proposed system demonstrated superior efficacy, successfully securing the first-place ranking on both official leaderboards. Specifically, we achieved an accuracy of 95.4% on the public test set and 96.3% on the private test set, highlighting the robustness of our method and contributing to the acceleration of context-aware misinformation detection in financial Natural Language Processing. Our models (14B and 32B) are available at https://huggingface.co/KaiNKaiho.

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### Pushing the Boundaries of Multiple Choice Evaluation to One Hundred Options

Authors: Nahyun Lee, Guijin Son
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14634v1

Multiple choice evaluation is widely used for benchmarking large language models, yet near ceiling accuracy in low option settings can be sustained by shortcut strategies that obscure true competence. Therefore, we propose a massive option evaluation protocol that scales the candidate set to one hundred options and sharply reduces the impact of chance performance. We apply this framework to a Korean orthography error detection task where models must pick the single incorrect sentence from a large candidate set. With fixed targets and repeated resampling and shuffling, we obtain stable estimates while separating content driven failures from positional artifacts. Across experiments, results indicate that strong performance in low option settings can overstate model competence. This apparent advantage often weakens under dense interference at high $N$, revealing gaps that conventional benchmarks tend to obscure. We identify two failure modes, semantic confusion and position bias toward early options under uncertainty. To isolate the effect of context length, we run padding controlled and length matched tests, which suggest that the main bottleneck is candidate ranking rather than context length. Together, these findings support massive option evaluation as a general framework for stress testing model reliability under extreme distractor density, beyond what low option benchmarks can reveal.

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### High-Speed Full-Color HDR Imaging via Unwrapping Modulo-Encoded Spike Streams

Authors: Chu Zhou, Siqi Yang, Kailong Zhang, Heng Guo, Zhaofei Yu, Boxin Shi, Imari Sato
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14632v1

Conventional RGB-based high dynamic range (HDR) imaging faces a fundamental trade-off between motion artifacts in multi-exposure captures and irreversible information loss in single-shot techniques. Modulo sensors offer a promising alternative by encoding theoretically unbounded dynamic range into wrapped measurements. However, existing modulo solutions remain bottlenecked by iterative unwrapping overhead and hardware constraints limiting them to low-speed, grayscale capture. In this work, we present a complete modulo-based HDR imaging system that enables high-speed, full-color HDR acquisition by synergistically advancing both the sensing formulation and the unwrapping algorithm. At the core of our approach is an exposure-decoupled formulation of modulo imaging that allows multiple measurements to be interleaved in time, preserving a clean, observation-wise measurement model. Building upon this, we introduce an iteration-free unwrapping algorithm that integrates diffusion-based generative priors with the physical least absolute remainder property of modulo images, supporting highly efficient, physics-consistent HDR reconstruction. Finally, to validate the practical viability of our system, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept hardware implementation based on modulo-encoded spike streams. This setup preserves the native high temporal resolution of spike cameras, achieving 1000 FPS full-color imaging while reducing output data bandwidth from approximately 20 Gbps to 6 Gbps. Extensive evaluations indicate that our coordinated approach successfully overcomes key systemic bottlenecks, demonstrating the feasibility of deploying modulo imaging in dynamic scenarios.

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### StoryCoder: Narrative Reformulation for Structured Reasoning in LLM Code Generation

Authors: Geonhui Jang, Dongyoon Han, YoungJoon Yoo
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14631v1

Effective code generation requires both model capability and a problem representation that carefully structures how models reason and plan. Existing approaches augment reasoning steps or inject specific structure into how models think, but leave scattered problem conditions unchanged. Inspired by the way humans organize fragmented information into coherent explanations, we propose StoryCoder, a narrative reformulation framework that transforms code generation questions into coherent natural language narratives, providing richer contextual structure than simple rephrasings. Each narrative consists of three components: a task overview, constraints, and example test cases, guided by the selected algorithm and genre. Experiments across 11 models on HumanEval, LiveCodeBench, and CodeForces demonstrate consistent improvements, with an average gain of 18.7% in zero-shot pass@10. Beyond accuracy, our analyses reveal that narrative reformulation guides models toward correct algorithmic strategies, reduces implementation errors, and induces a more modular code structure. The analyses further show that these benefits depend on narrative coherence and genre alignment, suggesting that structured problem representation is important for code generation regardless of model scale or architecture. Our code is available at https://github.com/gu-ni/StoryCoder.

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### CMTM: Cross-Modal Token Modulation for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation

Authors: Inseok Jeon, Suhwan Cho, Minhyeok Lee, Seunghoon Lee, Minseok Kang, Jungho Lee, Chaewon Park, Donghyeong Kim, Sangyoun Lee
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14630v1

Recent advances in unsupervised video object segmentation have highlighted the potential of two-stream architectures that integrate appearance and motion cues. However, fully leveraging these complementary sources of information requires effectively modeling their interdependencies. In this paper, we introduce cross-modality token modulation, a novel approach designed to strengthen the interaction between appearance and motion cues. Our method establishes dense connections between tokens from each modality, enabling efficient intra-modal and inter-modal information propagation through relation transformer blocks. To improve learning efficiency, we incorporate a token masking strategy that addresses the limitations of relying solely on increased model complexity. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across all public benchmarks, outperforming existing methods.

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### Switch-KD: Visual-Switch Knowledge Distillation for Vision-Language Models

Authors: Haoyi Sun, Xiaoxiao Wang, Ning Mao, Qian Wang, Lifu Mu, Wen Zheng, Tao Wei, Wei Chen
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14629v1

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in joint vision-language understanding, but their large scale poses significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a viable way to improve model capabilities without increasing model size or data requirements, making deployment more efficient. However, applying KD to VLMs is challenged by modality-specific supervision: although multimodal knowledge in VLMs is fused within the language space, current methods supervise each modality separately without explicitly addressing multimodal alignment, leading to inconsistent multimodal knowledge transfer. To address this, we propose Switch-KD, a visual-switch distillation framework that unifies vision-language knowledge transfer within a shared text-probability space. Switch-KD comprises two key components: (1) Visual-Switch Distillation, which switches the student's visual outputs into the teacher's language pathway to construct cross-modal probabilistic references for implicit visual knowledge transfer; and (2) Dynamic Bi-directional Logits Difference (DBiLD) loss, which adaptively aligns informative probability regions while preserving the distributional structures of teacher and student through bidirectional supervision. Guided by Switch-KD, a 0.5B TinyLLaVA effectively distills rich multimodal knowledge from its 3B teacher, yielding an average improvement of 3.6 points across 10 multimodal benchmarks without any architectural modification.

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### A Parallel Approach to Counting Exact Covers Based on Decomposability Property

Authors: Liangda Fang, Yaohui Luo, Delong Li, Xuanxiang Huang, Quanlong Guan
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14627v1

The exact cover problem is a classical NP-hard problem with broad applications in the area of AI. Algorithm DXZ is a method to count exact covers representing by zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams (ZBDDs). In this paper, we propose a zero-suppressed variant of decision decomposable negation normal form (in short, decision-ZDNNF), which is strictly more succinct than ZBDDs. We then design a novel parallel algorithm, namely DXD, which constructs a decision-ZDNNF representing the set of all exact covers. Furthermore, we improve DXD by dynamically updating connected components. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved DXD algorithm outperforms all of state-of-the-art methods.

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### ELMoE-3D: Leveraging Intrinsic Elasticity of MoE for Hybrid-Bonding-Enabled Self-Speculative Decoding in On-Premises Serving

Authors: Yuseon Choi, Jingu Lee, Jungjun Oh, Sunjoo Whang, Byeongcheol Kim, Minsung Kim, Hoi-Jun Yoo, Sangjin Kim
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.AR, cs.DC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14626v2

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become the dominant architecture for large-scale language models, yet on-premises serving remains fundamentally memory-bound as batching turns sparse per-token compute into dense memory activation. Memory-centric architectures (PIM, NMP) improve bandwidth but leave compute underutilized under MoE's low arithmetic intensity at high batch sizes. Speculative decoding (SD) trades idle compute for fewer target invocations, yet verification must load experts even for rejected tokens, severely limiting its benefit in MoE especially at low batch sizes. We propose ELMoE-3D, a hybrid-bonding (HB)-based HW-SW co-designed framework that unifies cache-based acceleration and speculative decoding to offer overall speedup across batch sizes. We identify two intrinsic elasticity axes of MoE-expert and bit-and jointly scale them to construct Elastic Self-Speculative Decoding (Elastic-SD), which serves as both an expert cache and a strongly aligned self-draft model accelerated by high HB bandwidth. Our LSB-augmented bit-sliced architecture exploits inherent redundancy in bit-slice representations to natively support bit-nested execution. On our 3D-stacked hardware, ELMoE-3D achieves an average $6.6\times$ speedup and $4.4\times$ energy efficiency gain over naive MoE serving on xPU across batch sizes 1-16, and delivers $2.2\times$ speedup and $1.4\times$ energy efficiency gain over the best-performing prior accelerator baseline.

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### Asking What Matters: Reward-Driven Clarification for Software Engineering Tasks

Authors: Sanidhya Vijayvargiya, Vijay Viswanathan, Graham Neubig
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14624v1

Humans often specify tasks incompletely, so assistants must know when and how to ask clarifying questions. However, effective clarification remains challenging in software engineering tasks as not all missing information is equally valuable, and questions must target information users can realistically provide. We study clarification in real software engineering tasks by quantifying which types of information most affect task success and which questions elicit useful responses from simulated users. Using Shapley attribution and distributional comparisons, we identify two key properties of effective clarification: task relevance (which information predicts success) and user answerability (what users can realistically provide). We operationalize these properties as multi-stage reinforcement learning rewards to train CLARITI, an 8B-parameter clarification module, that matches GPT-5's resolution rate on underspecified issues while generating 41% fewer questions. Our results suggest that grounding reward design in empirical analysis of information impact and user answerability improves clarification efficiency.

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### Multigrain-aware Semantic Prototype Scanning and Tri-Token Prompt Learning Embraced High-Order RWKV for Pan-Sharpening

Authors: Junfeng Li, Wenyang Zhou, Xueheng Li, Xuanhua He, Jianhou Gan, Wenqi Ren
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14622v1

In this work, we propose a Multigrain-aware Semantic Prototype Scanning paradigm for pan-sharpening, built upon a high-order RWKV architecture and a tri-token prompting mechanism derived from semantic clustering. Specifically, our method contains three key components: 1) Multigrain-aware Semantic Prototype Scanning. Although RWKV offers a efficient linear-complexity alternative to Transformers, its conventional bidirectional raster scanning is still semantic-agnostic and prone to positional bias. To address this issue, we introduce a semantic-driven scanning strategy that leverages locality-sensitive hashing to group semantically related regions and construct multi-grain semantic prototypes, enabling context-aware token reordering and more coherent global interaction. 2) Tri-token Prompt Learning. We design a tri-token prompting mechanism consisting of a global token, cluster-derived prototype tokens, and a learnable register token. The global and prototype tokens provide complementary semantic priors for RWKV modeling, while the register token helps suppress noisy and artifact-prone intermediate representations. 3) Invertible Q-Shift. To counteract spatial details, we apply center difference convolution on the value pathway to inject high-frequency information, and introduce an invertible multi-scale Q-shift operation for efficient and lossless feature transformation without parameter-heavy receptive field expansion. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method.

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### Differentially Private Conformal Prediction

Authors: Jiamei Wu, Ce Zhang, Zhipeng Cai, Jingsen Kong, Bei Jiang, Linglong Kong, Lingchen Kong
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14621v2

Conformal prediction (CP) has attracted broad attention as a simple and flexible framework for uncertainty quantification through prediction sets. In this work, we study how to deploy CP under differential privacy (DP) in a statistically efficient manner. We first introduce differential CP, a non-splitting conformal procedure that avoids the efficiency loss caused by data splitting and serves as a bridge between oracle CP and private conformal inference. By exploiting the stability properties of DP mechanisms, differential CP establishes a direct connection to oracle CP and inherits corresponding validity behavior. Building on this idea, we develop Differentially Private Conformal Prediction (DPCP), a fully private procedure that combines DP model training with a private quantile mechanism for calibration. We establish the end-to-end privacy guarantee of DPCP and investigate its coverage properties under additional regularity conditions. We further study the efficiency of both differential CP and DPCP under empirical risk minimization and general regression models, showing that DPCP can produce tighter prediction sets than existing private split conformal approaches under the same privacy budget. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods.

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### The Acoustic Camouflage Phenomenon: Re-evaluating Speech Features for Financial Risk Prediction

Authors: Dhruvin Dungrani, Disha Dungrani
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG, eess.AS, q-fin.CP, q-fin.ST
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14619v1

In computational paralinguistics, detecting cognitive load and deception from speech signals is a heavily researched domain. Recent efforts have attempted to apply these acoustic frameworks to corporate earnings calls to predict catastrophic stock market volatility. In this study, we empirically investigate the limits of acoustic feature extraction (pitch, jitter, and hesitation) when applied to highly trained speakers in in-the-wild teleconference environments. Utilizing a two-stream late-fusion architecture, we contrast an acoustic-based stream with a baseline Natural Language Processing (NLP) stream. The isolated NLP model achieved a recall of 66.25% for tail-risk downside events. Surprisingly, integrating acoustic features via late fusion significantly degraded performance, reducing recall to 47.08%. We identify this degradation as Acoustic Camouflage, where media-trained vocal regulation introduces contradictory noise that disrupts multimodal meta-learners. We present these findings as a boundary condition for speech processing applications in high-stakes financial forecasting.

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### Retrieve, Then Classify: Corpus-Grounded Automation of Clinical Value Set Authoring

Authors: Sumit Mukherjee, Juan Shu, Nairwita Mazumder, Tate Kernell, Celena Wheeler, Shannon Hastings, Chris Sidey-Gibbons
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14616v1

Clinical value set authoring -- the task of identifying all codes in a standardized vocabulary that define a clinical concept -- is a recurring bottleneck in clinical quality measurement and phenotyping. A natural approach is to prompt a large language model (LLM) to generate the required codes directly, but structured clinical vocabularies are large, version-controlled, and not reliably memorized during pretraining. We propose Retrieval-Augmented Set Completion (RASC): retrieve the $K$ most similar existing value sets from a curated corpus to form a candidate pool, then apply a classifier to each candidate code. Theoretically, retrieve-and-select can reduce statistical complexity by shrinking the effective output space from the full vocabulary to a much smaller retrieved candidate pool. We demonstrate the utility of RASC on 11,803 publicly available VSAC value sets, constructing the first large-scale benchmark for this task. A cross-encoder fine-tuned on SAPBert achieves AUROC~0.852 and value-set-level F1~0.298, outperforming a simpler three-layer Multilayer Perceptron (AUROC~0.799, F1~0.250) and both reduce the number of irrelevant candidates per true positive from 12.3 (retrieval-only) to approximately 3.2 and 4.4 respectively. Zero-shot GPT-4o achieves value-set-level F1~0.105, with 48.6\% of returned codes absent from VSAC entirely. This performance gap widens with increasing value set size, consistent with RASC's theoretical advantage. We observe similar performance gains across two other classifier model types, namely a cross-encoder initialized from pre-trained SAPBert and a LightGBM model, demonstrating that RASC's benefits extend beyond a single model class. The code to download and create the benchmark dataset, as well as the model training code is available at: \href{https://github.com/mukhes3/RASC}{https://github.com/mukhes3/RASC}.

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### An AI Co-Data-Scientist for Prioritizing Candidate Biomarkers from Wearable Sensor Data

Authors: Yubin Kim, Salman Rahman, Samuel Schmidgall, Chunjong Park, A. Ali Heydari, Ahmed A. Metwally, Hong Yu, Xin Liu, Xuhai Xu, Yuzhe Yang, Hyeonhoon Lee, Hyewon Jeong et al.
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14615v2

Wearable devices generate continuous physiological and behavioral data, but converting these signals into clinically reviewable biomarker hypotheses remains labor-intensive. We introduce CoDaS, an AI co-data-scientist that integrates multi-agent hypothesis generation, deterministic statistical analysis, adversarial validation and literature-grounded interpretation under human oversight. Across three wearable cohorts comprising 9,279 participant-observations, CoDaS prioritized candidate associations for mental-health and metabolic endpoints after internal checks for replication, stability, robustness and leakage. The system identified related circadian-instability signals associated with depression, including sleep-duration variability in DWB ($ρ$ = 0.252, $p$ < 0.001) and sleep-onset variability in GLOBEM ($ρ$ = 0.126, $p$ < 0.001), and derived a wearable cardiovascular-fitness index associated with insulin resistance (steps/resting heart rate; $ρ$ = -0.374, $p$ < 0.001). Adding these features to demographic models produced modest gains ($ΔR^2$ = 0.040 for depression, 0.021 for insulin resistance). In a 12-clinician review totaling approximately 25 active hours, clinician validity judgments aligned with CoDaS confidence tiers ($ρ$ = 0.67, $p$ = 0.005), whereas added clinical value and confidence to act were rated lower. CoDaS supports traceable, hypothesis-generating prioritization of wearable candidate biomarkers.

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### Tight Bounds for Learning Polyhedra with a Margin

Authors: Shyamal Patel, Santosh Vempala
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.DS, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14614v2

We give an algorithm for PAC learning intersections of $k$ halfspaces with a $ρ$ margin to within error $\varepsilon$ that runs in time $\textsf{poly}(k, \varepsilon^{-1}, ρ^{-1}) \cdot \exp \left(O(\sqrt{n \log(1/ρ) \log k})\right)$. Notably, this improves on prior work which had an exponential dependence on either $k$ or $ρ^{-1}$ and matches known cryptographic and Statistical Query lower bounds up to the logarithmic factors in $k$ and $ρ$ in the exponent. Our learning algorithm extends to the more general setting when we are only promised that most points have distance at least $ρ$ from the boundary of the polyhedron, making it applicable to continuous distributions as well.

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### Uncertainty-aware Generative Learning Path Recommendation with Cognition-Adaptive Diffusion

Authors: Xiangrui Xiong, Hang Liang, Baiyang Chen, Zifei Pan, Yanli Lee
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14613v1

Learning Path Recommendation (LPR) is critical for personalized education, yet current methods often fail to account for historical interaction uncertainty (e.g., lucky guesses or accidental slips) and lack adaptability to diverse learning goals. We propose U-GLAD (Uncertainty-aware Generative Learning Path Recommendation with Cognition-Adaptive Diffusion). To address representation bias, the framework models cognitive states as probability distributions, capturing the learner's underlying true state via a Gaussian LSTM. To ensure highly personalized recommendation, a goal-oriented concept encoder utilizes multi-head attention and objective-specific transformations to dynamically align concept semantics with individual learning goals, generating uniquely tailored embeddings. Unlike traditional discriminative ranking approaches, our model employs a generative diffusion model to predict the latent representation of the next optimal concept. Extensive evaluations on three public datasets demonstrate that U-GLAD significantly outperforms representative baselines. Further analyses confirm its superior capability in perceiving interaction uncertainty and providing stable, goal-driven recommendation paths.

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### ConfLayers: Adaptive Confidence-based Layer Skipping for Self-Speculative Decoding

Authors: Walaa Amer, Uday das, Fadi Kurdahi
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14612v1

Self-speculative decoding is an inference technique for large language models designed to speed up generation without sacrificing output quality. It combines fast, approximate decoding using a compact version of the model as a draft model with selective re-evaluation by the full target model. Some existing methods form the draft model by dynamically learning which layers to skip during inference, effectively creating a smaller subnetwork to speed up computation. However, using heuristic-based approaches to select layers to skip can often be simpler and more effective. In this paper, we propose ConfLayers, a dynamic plug-and-play approach to forming the draft model in self-speculative decoding via confidence-based intermediate layer skipping. The process iteratively computes confidence scores for all layers, selects layers to skip based on an adaptive threshold, evaluates the performance of the resulting set, and updates the best selection until no further improvement is achieved or a maximum number of iterations is reached. This framework avoids the overhead and complexity of training a layer skipping policy and can provide more consistent speed-quality trade-offs while preserving the adaptivity of the draft model to diverse tasks and datasets. The performance evaluation of ConfLayers across different models and datasets shows that our novel approach offers up to 1.4x speedup over vanilla LLM generation.

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### El Agente Forjador: Task-Driven Agent Generation for Quantum Simulation

Authors: Zijian Zhang, Aiwei Yin, Amaan Baweja, Jiaru Bai, Ignacio Gustin, Varinia Bernales, Alán Aspuru-Guzik
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI, physics.comp-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14609v1

AI for science promises to accelerate the discovery process. The advent of large language models (LLMs) and agentic workflows enables the expediting of a growing range of scientific tasks. However, most of the current generation of agentic systems depend on static, hand-curated toolsets that hinder adaptation to new domains and evolving libraries. We present El Agente Forjador, a multi-agent framework in which universal coding agents autonomously forge, validate, and reuse computational tools through a four-stage workflow of tool analysis, tool generation, task execution, and iterative solution evaluation. Evaluated across 24 tasks spanning quantum chemistry and quantum dynamics on five coding agent setups, we compare three operating modes: zero-shot generation of tools per task, reuse of a curriculum-built toolset, and direct problem-solving with the coding agents as the baseline. We find that our tool generation and reuse framework consistently improves accuracy over the baseline. We also show that reusing a toolset built by a stronger coding agent can reduce API cost and substantially raises the solution quality for weaker coding agents. Case studies further demonstrate that tools forged for different domains can be combined to solve hybrid tasks. Taken together, these results show that LLM-based agents can use their scientific knowledge and coding capabilities to autonomously build reusable scientific tools, pointing toward a paradigm in which agent capabilities are defined by the tasks they are designed to solve rather than by explicitly engineered implementations.

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### GDPR Auto-Formalization with AI Agents and Human Verification

Authors: Ha Thanh Nguyen, Wachara Fungwacharakorn, Sabine Wehnert, May Myo Zin, Yuntao Kong, Jieying Xue, Michał Araszkiewicz, Randy Goebel, Ken Satoh
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14607v2

We study the overall process of automatic formalization of GDPR provisions using large language models, within a human-in-the-loop verification framework. Rather than aiming for full autonomy, we adopt a role-specialized workflow in which LLM-based AI components, operating in a multi-agent setting with iterative feedback, generate legal scenarios, formal rules, and atomic facts. This is coupled with independent verification modules which include human reviewers' assessment of representational, logical, and legal correctness. Using this approach, we construct a high-quality dataset to be used for GDPR auto-formalization, and analyze both successful and problematic cases. Our results show that structured verification and targeted human oversight are essential for reliable legal formalization, especially in the presence of legal nuance and context-sensitive reasoning.

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### UniPASE: A Generative Model for Universal Speech Enhancement with High Fidelity and Low Hallucinations

Authors: Xiaobin Rong, Zheng Wang, Yushi Wang, Jun Gao, Jing Lu
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14606v2

Universal speech enhancement (USE) aims to restore speech signals from diverse distortions across multiple sampling rates. We propose UniPASE, an extension of the low-hallucination PASE framework tailored for USE. At its core is DeWavLM-Omni, a unified representation-level enhancement module fine-tuned from WavLM via knowledge distillation on a large-scale supervised multi-distortion dataset. This module directly converts degraded waveforms into clean and linguistically faithful phonetic representations, ensuring robust enhancement with minimal linguistic hallucination. Based on these enhanced phonetic representations, an Adapter generates enhanced acoustic representations containing rich acoustic details, which a neural Vocoder uses to reconstruct corresponding high-fidelity 16-kHz waveforms. A PostNet then converts the waveforms to 48~kHz before resampling them to their original rates, enabling seamless handling of inputs and outputs at multiple sampling rates. Experimental results on several evaluation datasets, covering sub-tasks and full tasks, demonstrate that UniPASE achieves superior or competitive performance compared with existing state-of-the-art models. The proposed model also serves as the backbone of our submission to the URGENT 2026 Challenge, which achieved 1st place in the objective evaluation. The source code and audio demos are available at https://github.com/xiaobin-rong/unipase/.

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### Towards Design Compositing

Authors: Abhinav Mahajan, Abhikhya Tripathy, Sudeeksha Reddy Pala, Vaibhav Methi, K J Joseph, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14605v2

Graphic design creation involves harmoniously assembling multimodal components such as images, text, logos, and other visual assets collected from diverse sources, into a visually-appealing and cohesive design. Recent methods have largely focused on layout prediction or complementary element generation, while retaining input elements exactly, implicitly assuming that provided components are already stylistically harmonious. In practice, inputs often come from disparate sources and exhibit visual mismatch, making this assumption limiting. We argue that identity-preserving stylization and compositing of input elements is a critical missing ingredient for truly harmonized components-to-design pipelines. To this end, we propose GIST, a training-free, identity-preserving image compositor that sits between layout prediction and typography generation, and can be plugged into any existing components-to-design or design-refining pipeline without modification. We demonstrate this by integrating GIST with two substantially different existing methods, LaDeCo and Design-o-meter. GIST shows significant improvements in visual harmony and aesthetic quality across both pipelines, as validated by LLaVA-OV and GPT-4V on aspect-wise ratings and pairwise preference over naive pasting. Project Page: abhinav-mahajan10.github.io/GIST/.

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### Hijacking Large Audio-Language Models via Context-Agnostic and Imperceptible Auditory Prompt Injection

Authors: Meng Chen, Kun Wang, Li Lu, Jiaheng Zhang, Tianwei Zhang
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14604v1

Modern Large audio-language models (LALMs) power intelligent voice interactions by tightly integrating audio and text. This integration, however, expands the attack surface beyond text and introduces vulnerabilities in the continuous, high-dimensional audio channel. While prior work studied audio jailbreaks, the security risks of malicious audio injection and downstream behavior manipulation remain underexamined. In this work, we reveal a previously overlooked threat, auditory prompt injection, under realistic constraints of audio data-only access and strong perceptual stealth. To systematically analyze this threat, we propose \textit{AudioHijack}, a general framework that generates context-agnostic and imperceptible adversarial audio to hijack LALMs. \textit{AudioHijack} employs sampling-based gradient estimation for end-to-end optimization across diverse models, bypassing non-differentiable audio tokenization. Through attention supervision and multi-context training, it steers model attention toward adversarial audio and generalizes to unseen user contexts. We also design a convolutional blending method that modulates perturbations into natural reverberation, making them highly imperceptible to users. Extensive experiments on 13 state-of-the-art LALMs show consistent hijacking across 6 misbehavior categories, achieving average success rates of 79\%-96\% on unseen user contexts with high acoustic fidelity. Real-world studies demonstrate that commercial voice agents from Mistral AI and Microsoft Azure can be induced to execute unauthorized actions on behalf of users. These findings expose critical vulnerabilities in LALMs and highlight the urgent need for dedicated defense.

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### A Synonymous Variational Perspective on the Rate-Distortion-Perception Tradeoff

Authors: Zijian Liang, Kai Niu, Changshuo Wang, Jin Xu, Ping Zhang
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.IT, cs.LG, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14603v2

The fundamental limit of natural signal compression has traditionally been characterized by classical rate-distortion (RD) theory through the tradeoff between coding rate and reconstruction distortion, while the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) framework introduces a divergence-based measure of perceptual quality as a modeling principle, leaving its theoretical origin unclear. In this paper, motivated by a synonymity-based semantic information perspective, we reformulate perceptual reconstruction as recovering any admissible sample within an ideal synonymous set (synset) associated with the source, rather than the source sample itself, and establish a synonymous source coding architecture. On this basis, we develop a synonymous variational inference (SVI) analysis framework with a synonymous variational lower bound (SVLBO) for tractable analysis of synset-oriented compression. Within this framework, we establish a synonymity-perception consistency principle, showing that optimal identification of semantic information is theoretically consistent with perceptual optimization. Based on this result, we further derive a tight-bound synonymous source coding rate characterization and show that its Jensen-limit relaxation leads to a synonymous rate-distortion-perception form for practical optimization. These analytical results show that the distributional divergence term arises naturally from the synset-based reconstruction objective, clarify its compatibility with existing RDP formulations and classical RD theory, and suggest the potential advantages of synonymous source coding.

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### CausalDetox: Causal Head Selection and Intervention for Language Model Detoxification

Authors: Yian Wang, Yuen Chen, Agam Goyal, Hari Sundaram
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14602v1

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate toxic content, posing significant risks for safe deployment. Current mitigation strategies often degrade generation quality or require costly human annotation. We propose CAUSALDETOX, a framework that identifies and intervenes on the specific attention heads causally responsible for toxic generation. Using the Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS), we isolate a minimal set of heads that are necessary and sufficient for toxicity. We utilize these components via two complementary strategies: (1) Local Inference-Time Intervention, which constructs dynamic, input-specific steering vectors for context-aware detoxification, and (2) PNS-Guided Fine-Tuning, which permanently unlearns toxic representations. We also introduce PARATOX, a novel benchmark of aligned toxic/non-toxic sentence pairs enabling controlled counterfactual evaluation. Experiments on ToxiGen, ImplicitHate, and ParaDetox show that CAUSALDETOX achieves up to 5.34% greater toxicity reduction compared to baselines while preserving linguistic fluency, and offers a 7x speedup in head selection.

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### NLP needs Diversity outside of 'Diversity'

Authors: Joshua Tint
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14595v1

This position paper argues that recent progress with diversity in NLP is disproportionately concentrated on a small number of areas surrounding fairness. We further argue that this is the result of a number of incentives, biases, and barriers which come together to disenfranchise marginalized researchers in non-fairness fields, or to move them into fairness-related fields. We substantiate our claims with an investigation into the demographics of NLP researchers by subfield, using our research to support a number of recommendations for ensuring that all areas within NLP can become more inclusive and equitable. In particular, we highlight the importance of breaking down feedback loops that reinforce disparities, and the need to address geographical and linguistic barriers that hinder participation in NLP research.

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### Mechanistic Decoding of Cognitive Constructs in Large Language Models

Authors: Yitong Shou, Manhao Guan
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14593v3

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasingly sophisticated affective capabilities, the internal mechanisms by which they process complex emotions remain unclear. Existing interpretability approaches often treat models as black boxes or focus on coarse-grained basic emotions, leaving the cognitive structure of more complex affective states underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a Cognitive Reverse-Engineering framework based on Representation Engineering (RepE) to analyze social-comparison jealousy. By combining appraisal theory with subspace orthogonalization, regression-based weighting, and bidirectional causal steering, we isolate and quantify two psychological antecedents of jealousy, Superiority of Comparison Person and Domain Self-Definitional Relevance, and examine their causal effects on model judgments. Experiments on eight LLMs from the Llama, Qwen, and Gemma families suggest that models natively encode jealousy as a structured linear combination of these constituent factors. Their internal representations are broadly consistent with the human psychological construct, treating Superiority as the foundational trigger and Relevance as the ultimate intensity multiplier. Our framework also demonstrates that toxic emotional states can be mechanically detected and surgically suppressed, suggesting a possible route toward representational monitoring and intervention for AI safety in multi-agent environments.

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### Prompt-Guided Image Editing with Masked Logit Nudging in Visual Autoregressive Models

Authors: Amir El-Ghoussani, Marc Hölle, Gustavo Carneiro, Vasileios Belagiannis
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14591v1

We address the problem of prompt-guided image editing in visual autoregressive models. Given a source image and a target text prompt, we aim to modify the source image according to the target prompt, while preserving all regions which are unrelated to the requested edit. To this end, we present Masked Logit Nudging, which uses the source image token maps to introduce a guidance step that aligns the model's predictions under the target prompt with these source token maps. Specifically, we convert the fixed source encodings into logits using the VAR encoding, nudging the model's predicted logits towards the targets along a semantic trajectory defined by the source-target prompts. Edits are applied only within spatial masks obtained through a dedicated masking scheme that leverages cross-attention differences between the source and edited prompts. Then, we introduce a refinement to correct quantization errors and improve reconstruction quality. Our approach achieves the best image editing performance on the PIE benchmark at 512px and 1024px resolutions. Beyond editing, our method delivers faithful reconstructions and outperforms previous methods on COCO at 512px and OpenImages at 1024px. Overall, our method outperforms VAR-related approaches and achieves comparable or even better performance than diffusion models, while being much faster. Code is available at 'https://github.com/AmirMaEl/MLN'.

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### AgileLog: A Forkable Shared Log for Agents on Data Streams

Authors: Shreesha G. Bhat, Tony Hong, Michael Noguera, Aishwarya Ganesan, Ramnatthan Alagappan
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14590v3

In modern data-streaming systems, alongside traditional programs, a new type of entity has emerged that can interact with streaming data: AI agents. Unlike traditional programs, AI agents use LLM reasoning to accomplish high-level tasks specified in natural language over streaming data. Unfortunately, current streaming systems cannot fully support agents: they lack the fundamental mechanisms to avoid the performance interference caused by agentic tasks and to safely handle agentic writes. We argue that the shared log, the core abstraction underlying streaming data, must support creating forks of itself, and that such a forkable shared log serves as a great substrate for agents acting on streaming data. We propose AgileLog, a new shared log abstraction that provides novel forking primitives for agentic use cases. We design Bolt, a system that implements the AgileLog abstraction. Bolt uses many novel techniques to make forks cheap and to provide logical and performance isolation.

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### AgileLog: A Forkable Shared Log for Agents on Data Streams

Authors: Shreesha G. Bhat, Tony Hong, Michael Noguera, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Aishwarya Ganesan
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14590v2

In modern data-streaming systems, alongside traditional programs, a new type of entity has emerged that can interact with streaming data: AI agents. Unlike traditional programs, AI agents use LLM reasoning to accomplish high-level tasks specified in natural language over streaming data. Unfortunately, current streaming systems cannot fully support agents: they lack the fundamental mechanisms to avoid the performance interference caused by agentic tasks and to safely handle agentic writes. We argue that the shared log, the core abstraction underlying streaming data, must support creating forks of itself, and that such a forkable shared log serves as a great substrate for agents acting on streaming data. We propose AgileLog, a new shared log abstraction that provides novel forking primitives for agentic use cases. We design Bolt, an implementation of the AgileLog abstraction, that uses novel techniques to make forks cheap, and provide logical and performance isolation.

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### CLion: Efficient Cautious Lion Optimizer with Enhanced Generalization

Authors: Feihu Huang, Guanyi Zhang, Songcan Chen
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14587v1

Lion optimizer is a popular learning-based optimization algorithm in machine learning, which shows impressive performance in training many deep learning models. Although convergence property of the Lion optimizer has been studied, its generalization analysis is still missing. To fill this gap, we study generalization property of the Lion via algorithmic stability based on the mathematical induction. Specifically, we prove that the Lion has a generalization error of $O(\frac{1}{Nτ^T})$, where $N$ is training sample size, and $τ>0$ denotes the smallest absolute value of non-zero element in gradient estimator, and $T$ is the total iteration number. In addition, we obtain an interesting byproduct that the SignSGD algorithm has the same generalization error as the Lion. To enhance generalization of the Lion, we design a novel efficient Cautious Lion (i.e., CLion) optimizer by cautiously using sign function. Moreover, we prove that our CLion has a lower generalization error of $O(\frac{1}{N})$ than $O(\frac{1}{Nτ^T})$ of the Lion, since the parameter $τ$ generally is very small. Meanwhile, we study convergence property of our CLion optimizer, and prove that our CLion has a fast convergence rate of $O(\frac{\sqrt{d}}{T^{1/4}})$ under $\ell_1$-norm of gradient for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where $d$ denotes the model dimension. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate effectiveness of our CLion optimizer.

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### CPGRec+: A Balance-oriented Framework for Personalized Video Game Recommendations

Authors: Xiping Li, Aier Yang, Jianghong Ma, Kangzhe Liu, Shanshan Feng, Haijun Zhang, Yi Zhao
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14586v4

The rapid expansion of gaming industry requires advanced recommender systems tailored to its dynamic landscape. Existing Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based methods primarily prioritize accuracy over diversity, overlooking their inherent trade-off. To address this, we previously proposed CPGRec, a balance-oriented gaming recommender system. However, CPGRec fails to account for critical disparities in player-game interactions, which carry varying significance in reflecting players' personal preferences and may exacerbate over-smoothness issues inherent in GNN-based models. Moreover, existing approaches underutilize the reasoning capabilities and extensive knowledge of large language models (LLMs) in addressing these limitations. To bridge this gap, we propose two new modules. First, Preference-informed Edge Reweighting (PER) module assigns signed edge weights to qualitatively distinguish significant player interests and disinterests while then quantitatively measuring preference strength to mitigate over-smoothing in graph convolutions. Second, Preference-informed Representation Generation (PRG) module leverages LLMs to generate contextualized descriptions of games and players by reasoning personal preferences from comparing global and personal interests, thereby refining representations of players and games. Experiments on \textcolor{black}{two Steam datasets} demonstrate CPGRec+'s superior accuracy and diversity over state-of-the-art models. The code is accessible at https://github.com/HsipingLi/CPGRec-Plus.

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### CPGRec+: A Balance-oriented Framework for Personalized Video Game Recommendations

Authors: Xiping Li, Aier Yang, Jianghong Ma, Kangzhe Liu, Shanshan Feng, Haijun Zhang, Yi Zhao
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14586v3

The rapid expansion of gaming industry requires advanced recommender systems tailored to its dynamic landscape. Existing Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based methods primarily prioritize accuracy over diversity, overlooking their inherent trade-off. To address this, we previously proposed CPGRec, a balance-oriented gaming recommender system. However, CPGRec fails to account for critical disparities in player-game interactions, which carry varying significance in reflecting players' personal preferences and may exacerbate over-smoothness issues inherent in GNN-based models. Moreover, existing approaches underutilize the reasoning capabilities and extensive knowledge of large language models (LLMs) in addressing these limitations. To bridge this gap, we propose two new modules. First, Preference-informed Edge Reweighting (PER) module assigns signed edge weights to qualitatively distinguish significant player interests and disinterests while then quantitatively measuring preference strength to mitigate over-smoothing in graph convolutions. Second, Preference-informed Representation Generation (PRG) module leverages LLMs to generate contextualized descriptions of games and players by reasoning personal preferences from comparing global and personal interests, thereby refining representations of players and games. Experiments on \textcolor{black}{two Steam datasets} demonstrate CPGRec+'s superior accuracy and diversity over state-of-the-art models. The code is accessible at https://github.com/HsipingLi/CPGRec-Plus.

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### Prompt Optimization Is a Coin Flip: Diagnosing When It Helps in Compound AI Systems

Authors: Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui, Wei Qiu, Ziyuan Li, Bing Zhu, Peiyang He
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14585v2

Prompt optimization in compound AI systems is statistically indistinguishable from a coin flip: across 72 optimization runs on Claude Haiku 4.5 (6 methods $\times$ 4 tasks $\times$ 3 repeats), 49% score below zero-shot; on Amazon Nova Lite, the failure rate is even higher. Yet on one task, all six methods improve over zero-shot by up to $+6.8$ points. What distinguishes success from failure? We investigate with 18,000 grid evaluations and 144 optimization runs, testing two assumptions behind end-to-end optimization tools like TextGrad and DSPy, in the order they must be answered: (A) agent prompts interact, requiring joint rather than independent optimization, and (B) individual prompts are worth optimizing at all. Interaction effects are never significant ($p > 0.52$, all $F < 1.0$), and optimization helps only when the task has exploitable output structure: a format the model can produce but does not default to. We further give a mechanistic account: instruction-tuning compresses input phrasing into a narrow output distribution, eliminating the very phrasing-sensitivity that joint optimization assumes. We provide a two-stage diagnostic: an \$80 ANOVA pre-test for agent coupling, and a 10-minute headroom test that predicts whether optimization is worthwhile, turning a coin flip into an informed decision.

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### From Risk to Rescue: An Agentic Survival Analysis Framework for Liquidation Prevention

Authors: Fernando Spadea, Oshani Seneviratne
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14583v1

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending protocols like Aave v3 rely on over-collateralization to secure loans, yet users frequently face liquidation due to volatile market conditions. Existing risk management tools utilize static health-factor thresholds, which are reactive and fail to distinguish between administrative "dust" cleanup and genuine insolvency. In this work, we propose an autonomous agent that leverages time-to-event (survival) analysis and moves beyond prediction to execution. Unlike passive risk signals, this agent perceives risk, simulates counterfactual futures, and executes protocol-faithful interventions to proactively prevent liquidations. We introduce a return period metric derived from a numerically stable XGBoost Cox proportional hazards model to normalize risk across transaction types, coupled with a volatility-adjusted trend score to filter transient market noise. To select optimal interventions, we implement a counterfactual optimization loop that simulates potential user actions to find the minimum capital required to mitigate risk. We validate our approach using a high-fidelity, protocol-faithful Aave v3 simulator on a cohort of 4,882 high-risk user profiles. The results demonstrate the agent's ability to prevent liquidations in imminent-risk scenarios where static rules fail, effectively "saving the unsavable" while maintaining a zero worsening rate, providing a critical safety guarantee often missing in autonomous financial agents. Furthermore, the system successfully differentiates between actionable financial risks and negligible dust events, optimizing capital efficiency where static rules fail.

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### MapSR: Prompt-Driven Land Cover Map Super-Resolution via Vision Foundation Models

Authors: Ruiqi Wang, Qi Yu, Jie Ma, Hanlin Wu
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14582v1

High-resolution (HR) land-cover mapping is often constrained by the high cost of dense HR annotations. We revisit this problem from the perspective of map super-resolution, which enhances coarse low-resolution (LR) land-cover products into HR maps at the resolution of the input imagery. Existing weakly supervised methods can leverage LR labels, but they typically use them to retrain dense predictors with substantial computational cost. We propose MapSR, a prompt-driven framework that decouples supervision from model training. MapSR uses LR labels once to extract class prompts from frozen vision foundation model features through a lightweight linear probe, after which HR mapping proceeds via training-free metric inference and graph-based prediction refinement. Specifically, class prompts are estimated by aggregating high-confidence HR features identified by the linear probe, and HR predictions are obtained by cosine-similarity matching followed by graph-based propagation for spatial refinement. Experiments on the Chesapeake Bay dataset show that MapSR achieves 59.64% mIoU without any HR labels, remaining competitive with the strongest weakly supervised baseline and surpassing a fully supervised baseline. Notably, MapSR reduces trainable parameters by four orders of magnitude and shortens training time from hours to minutes, enabling scalable HR mapping under limited annotation and compute budgets. The code is available at https://github.com/rikirikirikiriki/MapSR.

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### TurboTalk: Progressive Distillation for One-Step Audio-Driven Talking Avatar Generation

Authors: Xiangyu Liu, Feng Gao, Xiaomei Zhang, Yong Zhang, Xiaoming Wei, Zhen Lei, Xiangyu Zhu
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14580v2

Existing audio-driven video digital human generation models rely on multi-step denoising, resulting in substantial computational overhead that severely limits their deployment in real-world settings. While one-step distillation approaches can significantly accelerate inference, they often suffer from training instability. To address this challenge, we propose TurboTalk, a two-stage progressive distillation framework that effectively compresses a multi-step audio-driven video diffusion model into a single-step generator. We first adopt Distribution Matching Distillation to obtain a strong and stable 4-step student, and then progressively reduce the denoising steps from 4 to 1 through adversarial distillation. To ensure stable training under extreme step reduction, we introduce a progressive timestep sampling strategy and a self-compare adversarial objective that provides an intermediate adversarial reference that stabilizes progressive distillation. Our method achieve single-step generation of video talking avatar, boosting inference speed by 120 times while maintaining high generation quality.

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### Enhancing Mental Health Counseling Support in Bangladesh using Culturally-Grounded Knowledge

Authors: Md Arid Hasan, Azhagu Meena SP, Aditya Khan, Abu Md Akteruzzaman Bhuiyan, Helal Uddin Ahmed, Joysree Debi, Farig Sadeque, Annie En-Shiun Lee, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14576v1

Large language models (LLMs) show promise in generating supportive responses for mental health and counseling applications. However, their responses often lack cultural sensitivity, contextual grounding, and clinically appropriate guidance. This work addresses the gap of how to systematically incorporate domain-specific, clinically validated knowledge into LLMs to improve counseling quality. We utilize and compare two approaches, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and a knowledge graph (KG)-based method, designed to support para-counselors. Our KG is constructed manually and clinically validated, capturing causal relationships between stressors, interventions, and outcomes, with contributions from multidisciplinary people. We evaluated multiple LLMs in both settings using BERTScore F1 and SBERT cosine similarity, as well as human evaluation across five metrics, which is designed to directly measure the effectiveness of counseling beyond similarity at the surface level. The results show that KG-based approaches consistently improve contextual relevance, clinical appropriateness, and practical usability compared to RAG alone, demonstrating that structured, expert-validated knowledge plays a critical role in addressing LLMs limitations in counseling tasks.

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### Generative Augmented Inference of LLM-generated Data for Market Research: Theory and Empirical Evidence

Authors: Cheng Lu, Mengxin Wang, Dennis J. Zhang, Heng Zhang
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ME, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14575v3

Marketing research often relies on parameters estimated from costly human-generated data, such as conjoint survey responses, purchase decisions, and field experiment outcomes. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems offer inexpensive auxiliary data, but introduce a new challenge: AI outputs are not direct observations of the target outcomes, but could involve high-dimensional representations with complex and unknown relationships to human labels. Conventional methods leverage AI predictions as direct proxies for true labels, which can be inefficient or unreliable when this relationship is weak or misspecified. We propose Generative Augmented Inference (GAI), a general framework that incorporates AI-generated outputs as informative features for estimating models of human-labeled outcomes. GAI uses an orthogonal moment construction that enables consistent estimation and valid inference with a flexible, nonparametric relationship between LLM-generated outputs and human labels. We establish asymptotic normality and a key dominance result: under random labeling, GAI is optimal within a unified class of debiased estimators-including human-data-only estimators and state-of-the-art debiasing methods-and delivers strict improvements under a mild informativeness condition. Even when the labeled sample is not representative of the target population, an extended variant of GAI still dominates the weighted human-data-only estimator. Empirically, GAI outperforms benchmarks across diverse marketing research settings. In a conjoint analysis, it halves estimation error and reduces human labeling requirements by over 75%. In a pricing study, it consistently outperforms alternative estimators when all methods receive identical auxiliary inputs. In a health insurance study, it saves over 90% of labels while preserving decision accuracy.

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### M3D-Net: Multi-Modal 3D Facial Feature Reconstruction Network for Deepfake Detection

Authors: Haotian Wu, Yue Cheng, Shan Bian
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14574v1

With the rapid advancement of deep learning in image generation, facial forgery techniques have achieved unprecedented realism, posing serious threats to cybersecurity and information authenticity. Most existing deepfake detection approaches rely on the reconstruction of isolated facial attributes without fully exploiting the complementary nature of multi-modal feature representations. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel Multi-Modal 3D Facial Feature Reconstruction Network (M3D-Net) for deepfake detection. Our method leverages an end-to-end dual-stream architecture that reconstructs fine-grained facial geometry and reflectance properties from single-view RGB images via a self-supervised 3D facial reconstruction module. The network further enhances detection performance through a 3D Feature Pre-fusion Module (PFM), which adaptively adjusts multi-scale features, and a Multi-modal Fusion Module (MFM) that effectively integrates RGB and 3D-reconstructed features using attention mechanisms. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of detection accuracy and robustness, significantly outperforming existing methods while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse scenarios.

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### Corpus2Skill: Distilling Enterprise Knowledge into Navigable Agent Skills for QA and RAG

Authors: Yiqun Sun, Pengfei Wei, Lawrence B. Hsieh
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14572v4

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM responses in external evidence but treats the model as a passive consumer of search results, with no view of how the corpus is organized or what it has not yet seen. We present Corpus2Skill, a system-level retrieval architecture for bounded, structurally coherent corpora such as enterprise knowledge bases: an offline compiler distills the corpus into a hierarchical skill directory, and at serve time an LLM agent navigates it, drilling from a bird's-eye view through progressively finer summaries down to documents and backtracking when a branch is unproductive. On an enterprise customer-support benchmark, Corpus2Skill improves both answer quality and grounding over single-shot dense, hybrid, hierarchical-retrieval, and agentic RAG baselines at a moderate cost tradeoff, and the lead persists under encoder-matched controls and paired significance tests. An eleven-dataset study shows that corpus navigation is not a universal replacement for retrieval: it significantly wins on five datasets, ties on three, and loses on three. It helps on single-domain corpora with a recoverable topical taxonomy, but flat retrieval remains preferable on open-domain factoid pools or homogeneous-tabular corpora that defeat top-level clustering. We characterize this scope distinction as a design guideline for knowledge-grounded systems. Code is available at https://github.com/dukesun99/Corpus2Skill.

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### Don't Retrieve, Navigate: Distilling Enterprise Knowledge into Navigable Agent Skills for QA and RAG

Authors: Yiqun Sun, Pengfei Wei, Lawrence B. Hsieh
Published: 2026-04-16
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14572v3

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM responses in external evidence but treats the model as a passive consumer of search results, with no view of how the corpus is organized or what it has not yet seen. We present Corpus2Skill, which distills a document corpus offline into a hierarchical skill directory and lets an LLM agent navigate it at serve time, drilling from a bird's-eye view through progressively finer summaries down to documents, and backtracking when a branch is unproductive. On an enterprise customer-support benchmark, Corpus2Skill improves both answer quality and grounding over single-shot dense, hybrid, hierarchical-retrieval, and agentic RAG baselines at a moderate cost tradeoff. A ten-subset generalization study further shows that corpus navigation is not a universal replacement for retrieval: it consistently helps on single-domain corpora with a recoverable topical taxonomy, but flat retrieval remains preferable on open-domain factoid pools or homogeneous-tabular corpora that defeat top-level clustering. We characterize this scope distinction and discuss it as a design guideline for knowledge-grounded systems. Code is available at https://github.com/dukesun99/Corpus2Skill.

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